The Future That Never Was: Angie’s List Reimagines The Golden Age Of Futuristic Home Designs

From video doorbells to solar roof panels, cutting-edge ideas for the home that once seemed like a fantasy have made their way into the mainstream today. But in a clever twist on the future that never was, the folks at Angie’s List took seven of the past’s most eccentric future-home ideas and brought them to life in a new series of photorealistic architectural renderings that are a time capsule of futuristic housing promises that remain unfilled.

“The period between 1958 and 1963 can easily be described as the Golden Age of American Futurism,” according to Angie’s List. With NASA being founded in 1958 and “The Jetsons” animated sitcom airing from 1962 to 1963, the home services website says, “Those few years were filled with some of our wildest ideas of a techno-utopian future. Some of this era’s wildest ideas were about how houses of the future would look.”

To create the project, the Angie’s List research team set out to identify concepts for houses of the future created between 1900 and 1970. They recreated concepts from different decades that included various building materials, construction techniques and architectural styles.

Research in hand, the artists on the team were inspired to create the realistic computer-generated wonders shown here that are a far cry from how homes of those eras actually turned out. But as Angie’s List notes, “Sometimes astute, sometimes idealistic, these visions for the future from past generations are an untapped source of inspiration for homeowners who want to take risks and create spaces that are unique.”

Here are the seven houses with descriptions by Angie’s List. Ready to step inside?

1. Rolling Houses (1930s): The September 1934 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics magazine assured readers that spherical houses would soon become highly fashionable, even if the appeal of living in a giant hamster ball isn’t immediately obvious. The innovation was intended to make the remote construction and delivery of new homes more straightforward, as traveling in the ball would be a bad idea if you valued your crockery and ornaments.

Features for design reference: Shell is prefabricated at another location, spaces for windows are cut out; large band is wrapped around ball to keep it off the ground; rolled to its location being pulled by a tractor; fixtures added afterwards.

2. Space House (1950s): Just four years prior to the Dome House, the cover of the December 1953 Science Fiction Adventures magazine proposed a glass dome, but in outer space. Puerto Rican cover artist Alex Schomburg’s free-floating snow globes come complete with rooftop chutes for launching space hatchbacks out into the great unknown.

Curiously, Schomburg had been the artist and company partner of a window display studio in the 1920s. His house design incorporates a double layer of glass: the dome protecting the property from the space atmosphere and tinted wall-to-wall windows on the exterior of the house.

Features for design reference: Ports for spacecraft, surrounded by protective dome, Astro-Turf garden, communications transmitters, plenty of open space.

3. Glass House (1920s): Utilizing a special new kind of glass designed to admit the ultraviolet “health rays” of the sun, the Vitaglass house would offer a year-round summer thanks to the addition of mercury arc lamps for gloomy days. Like all the best new architectural innovations, Vitaglass was first tested in the monkey house of a city zoo. But even plain glass was controversial during the interwar years, with worries that its new popularity would discourage people from ever going outside.

Features for design reference: Glass that admitted ultraviolet rays that “tanned the skin, enrich the blood and brace up the system to resist disease.” Produced artificial light when necessary for a permanent summer effect. Windows guaranteed forever. Movable walls. Convertible metal furniture. Garage for a car/flying machine.

4. Moving House (1900s): Jean-Marc Côté’s “House Rolling Through The Countryside” featured in a collection of cigarette cards drawn up around the turn of the 19th century, imagining what life would look like in the year 2000.

Equal parts “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Wacky Races,” this utopian vision posits a very social mobile home version of architectural tendencies that we’re actually seeing today. Its rooftop garden, for example, might offset the carbon footprint of the vehicle, easing the conscience of the steam-powered digital nomads on board.

Features for design reference: Rooftop garden, steam-powered movement, covered veranda/viewing platform, driver at front in steering box is wearing goggles.

5. Underwater House (1960s): General Motors created the Futurama II Pavilion to blow the minds of visitors to the New York World’s Fair in 1964. You can see their underwater world in motion in a promotional movie from the time.

While the rest of the world was staring at the stars, GM noted that we still have whole oceans that remain unconquered. “Our new knowledge and skills — new power and mobility — have given us a new and wondrous underwater world,” guide Ray Dashner told visitors on the tour. “A miracle of gifts from the limitless treasury of the sea.” Put that in your real estate brochure!

Features for design reference: By General Motors at the Futurama 2 exhibit, part of a World’s Fair. It is a hotel called Hotel Atlantis. Glass front with table and people looking out at the sea. Underwater to farm the vast potential of the sea. What appears to be an elevator to the hotel from the surface, possibly air system. People traveled in seated crafts called aquacopters to explore the undersea world for minerals. Trains of submarines transport materials and goods along the waterways of the undersea. The structure can sit on the ground or float in the water.

6. Lightweight House (1940s): A far more civilized way of moving a house is to simply have it transported atop a tray carried by a dozen strong men. Okay, so this creepy image was only suggested for illustration purposes, but seriously: why do our houses have to be so dangerously heavy? The January 1942 authors of “This Unfinished World” offered a vision that gets closer every day: using super-light aerogel to create buildings that are earthquake-resistant and require less resources to build. Today, the lightest material in the world is graphene aerogel, which can be 3D printed, and scientists are hard at working figuring how to use the material to lighten the environmental toll of conventional construction techniques.

Features for design reference: Built using aerogel bubbles, 20 times lighter than water. Held down by wind anchors instead of foundations. Walls could be formed with a spray gun. Sound proof and well insulated. No heavy materials that could fall and be a danger during earthquake.

7. Dome House (1950s): “Current research in solar energy and architecture indicates that by 1989 you may be living in a house with an exterior made entirely of steel-hard glass,” claimed the cover story of Mechanix Illustrated’s June 1957 issue.

The dome house’s eco-punk utopianism took sustainability as its driving factor. The rotating dome would allow homeowners to make efficient use of the sun’s energy. And while hydroponic vegetable patches like those outside the dome house do not yet feature in the average 21st Century garden, the hydroponics industry in general is set to triple in value to $725 million between now and 2023.

Features for design reference: Surrounded by dome of steel-hard glass, hydroponic gardens for vegetables and flowers, revolving living quarters to get the most sunlight when wanted. Swimming pool. Air-conditioning regulator in the basement.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.